Recording a Consultation with the AI Scribe

The AI Scribe records your consultation and writes a draft note into the fields of your own consultation template — tongue findings in your tongue field, the plan in your plan field. You review it and finalise it, exactly as you would a note you'd typed.

It transcribes what was said, so speak your findings out loud as you work. It won't infer a diagnosis from a conversation, and it never invents a finding that wasn't dictated.

Before You Start

Patient consent. Every recording begins with you ticking a consent box confirming your patient has agreed. Let them know before you press Record — the same obligation that applies any time a consultation is recorded.

Wallet credit. Recordings cost 3c per minute of audio, charged from your Daobook wallet when the note is ready. You need at least $1 of credit to start a recording. If your clinic shares one wallet, recordings come out of the owner's credit.

If you run a clinic. You choose which of your practitioners can record — it's off for a new team practitioner until you turn it on. Go to Settings → Practice Info → AI, open "Manage who has it in your clinic" on the AI Scribe card, tick the practitioners you want and click Save access. Worth doing deliberately rather than by default: recording a patient is a practice decision, and if your clinic shares one wallet, their recordings come out of your credit.

The same tick box also sits on each practitioner's own profile, under Settings → Team & Clinics → Team Members & Invites, in Role & Access Settings, if you're already in there changing someone's role. It's the same setting in two places.

Step 1: Turn On the Recorder

Go to Settings → Practice Info → AI, find the AI Scribe card, tick "Show the recorder on my consultations" and click Save.

This is a personal setting. Turning it on adds the recorder to your own consultations and doesn't affect anyone else on your team.

If you work in someone else's clinic and the AI Scribe card isn't there, your clinic owner hasn't switched it on for you yet. Owners and admins decide who can record — ask them to tick your name under "Manage who has it in your clinic" on their own AI Scribe card. If it's your own clinic, there's nothing to grant.

While you're on that card, set your Languages — the language your consultations are spoken in, and the language you want the draft note written in. If you work in English, the defaults are already right and there's nothing to change.

Step 2: Start Recording

Open a consultation. The recorder appears on a saved draft — it isn't shown once a consultation has been finalised.

Find the AI scribe panel above the consultation form.
Tick "Patient consents to recording". The Start recording button becomes available.
Click Start recording and have your consult as normal. A timer runs beside the Stop button.

Speak your findings as you go — tongue, pulse, what you needled, what you're prescribing and why. Anything you say is available to the note; anything you only think isn't.

Step 3: Pause When You're Not Talking

Use Pause whenever you leave the room or stop speaking — needle retention, treatment time, a phone call.

The scribe can't tell talking from quiet, so unpaused silence is recorded and billed like anything else. Paused time is neither. Click Resume when you're talking again, and the whole consultation still becomes a single note.

Pressing Stop and starting again does something different: that's two recordings and two separate notes.

Step 4: Stop, and Carry On

Click Stop. You'll see the recording upload, then transcribe. You don't have to wait — keep working, and the draft is added to your note when it's ready.

If you navigate away mid-recording, Daobook keeps what it captured. Come back to that consultation on the same device and you'll be offered the audio, with the choice to upload it or discard it.

Consultations in Chinese

The scribe handles two languages, and they're set separately: the language the consultation is spoken in, and the language the note is written in.

Under Settings → Practice Info → AI, in the AI Scribe card:

Consultations are spoken in — English, 中文（普通话）or 粤语.
Write the draft note in — Same as spoken, English, or 中文（简体）.

Left on Same as spoken, a Mandarin consult gives you a Chinese note and an English consult gives you an English one. Nothing is translated unless you ask for it.

Both choices also appear on the recorder itself, as Spoken and Note in. They start from your settings, so a practice that works in one language sets it once and forgets it — but you can change either one for a single patient without going back to Settings. They lock while a recording is running, since by then they describe audio you've already captured.

Asking for a different note language translates it. Set Spoken to 中文（普通话）and Note in to English and you'll consult in Mandarin and get an English draft, with the clinical content carried across as it was said. Useful if your records need to stay in English for referrals while your consults don't.

Pick the language before you press Record. A consultation recorded under the wrong language doesn't fail with an error — it produces a transcript you can't use, and it's still charged.

If you switch between languages mid-consult

One recording is transcribed in one language. If you and your patient move back and forth between English and Chinese in the same sentence, choose whichever language most of the consult is in and expect the passages in the other one to come out poorly. It's the one case the scribe can't do well.

Where the Note Lands

The scribe is offered the text fields of the template that consultation is using, and matches content to them by their labels. A field labelled "Tongue & Pulse" attracts tongue and pulse; a field labelled "Plan" attracts the plan.

Anything clinically relevant that suits none of your fields goes into your Notes field, or the first main field if your template has no Notes.

If something consistently lands in the wrong place, the label is the thing to change. Renaming a vague field to what it actually holds fixes most misfiling.

Using Your Own Headings

If a field already contains headings, the scribe files what was said under each one instead of adding a block at the bottom.

This is useful if you work through a set list of questions. Put the headings in the field's Default text on your consultation template and they'll be waiting in every new consultation.

Daobook recognises a heading as:

a line in bold, on its own
a heading created with the editor's heading button
a short line ending in a colon or question mark — "Sleep:", "Digestion?"

Your own words are never rewritten. The scribe only adds beneath your headings, and anything that belongs to none of them goes at the end of that field.

One Field or Several

Both work.

Several fields — each part of the consult is filed where it belongs.
A single text field — everything lands there as clean, punctuated prose. The simplest way to work, and there's nothing wrong with staying there.

What the Scribe Won't Do

It only writes into text fields. It will never tick a checkbox for you.
It doesn't record acupuncture points or build prescriptions. Points and herbs are structured clinical records, and they stay yours to enter.
It doesn't finalise anything. What you get is always a draft for review.

How Your Audio Is Handled

Audio is transcribed in Australia and permanently deleted the moment your draft note is written — your consultation audio never leaves the country. Arranging that transcript into your note uses the same overseas AI processing as Daobook's other AI features, under the disclosure shown on the AI Scribe card in your settings.

Tips:

Say your findings out loud. "Tongue is pale, thin white coat" gets recorded; a thought you didn't voice doesn't.
Pause the moment you leave the room — it's the single biggest difference to what a consultation costs you.
Check the Spoken language before you press Record if you see patients in more than one language. The wrong one costs you the recording.